Last dance

I was really saddened to hear the news about Donna Summer’s death yesterday. She was 63.

It’s easy to laugh at disco—the era of really bad clothes, bad hair, Charlie’s Angels, the Bee Gees. Disco has a lot to answer for. In two words: “MacArthur Park”.

I thought it was cringeworthy even when I was in the midst of it.

But Summer transcended it all. In fact, disco didn’t do her voice justice; it was all strength, purity & vivacity. She could knock a melody out of the park.

Listen to her take on “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”. I’m not a fan of the Lloyd Webber turgid, overblown style of songwriting; but Summer’s version is personal, not pompous. (An amazing feat.)

I’ve had many of her high-energy covers on my workout playlist for years. (Turns out there is a reason for disco—the beat is great to crank you up to full cardio use.) Seriously—there’s nothing like “She Works Hard for the Money” or “Bad Girls” to get your treadmill strike going.

Just hearing “Last Dance” is enough to make me suit up & go for a run. Really—you can’t sit still with her energy all around you.

& you cannot sit around feeling stodgy & crabby when “Unconditional Love” is playing. That one’s pure joy.

Ignore the quality of the video & listen to her voice. That glorious, vibrant voice.

The folks who made "friend" a verb

While you’re trying frantically to click the “Buy” button to get in on Facebook’s IPO today, you might want to multi-task, and read this “Letter from Mark Zuckerberg”, by Andy Borowitz.

Really—nothing to add. I invest my money in wine futures. And not too much in the future, if you catch my drift. Like—only as far as it takes me to get the cork out of the bottle.

We’ll see who does better in the end.

Thinking inside the box

If you’re feeling in need of an anti-stressor, I give you Maru. & boxes.

Maru never met a box he didn't love.

But this one is kind of heart-breaking. Until Maru takes his revenge.

Linking wonder, Part 3

LinkedIn is the online equivalent of a hair salon when it comes to inspiring stories. You’ll never be at a loss for “WTF” moments if you spend even ten or 15 minutes on discussions at the networking sites.

Here’s one that you know I had to gather unto me & then share with you. The poster says on her profile that she’s “Director Strategic Marketing” at a vague organization in Spokane that I can’t find. Her previous position is listed as “Manager of Commercial Operations & Analytics” at a company that likewise doesn’t seem to exist.

& she claims to have a “Masters, Management Consulting, Marketing” from the Harvard Business School. No date.

So I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that the“discussion” she started on “The Essentials of Script Writing Jobs” should be…somewhat less than confidence-instilling when it comes to, you know, mastery of writing.

The first graf alone wanders around like a puppy in a room full of dropped canapés in the aftermath of a cocktail party. & maybe the puppy lapped up a few spilt martinis, too.

Seriously, I was going to highlight the really nonsensical parts, but the whole thing qualifies.

Keep reading. When you get to her bullet points, you start to wonder if perhaps English is not her first language. (In which case she can qualify for the product manager job I saw listed last week.)

I will say, I haven’t bothered to follow the link to her website where you can “Get Paid For You [sic] Writing Potential”. Really tempted, but I'm running low on my supply of vodka.

Lest you think she was just having a bad day, I came across another of her shilling-for-traffic efforts:

Here she proves beyond all question that she knows as much about the business of writing as she does about writing itself. She probably scraped data from other sites.

The penultimate graf is the kicker, where she assures the reader that to attract business you must be simply impressive & charge less than everyone else. I especially love it when she urges us to “offer them with unlimited revisions.”

Yeah—that’s definitely the road to success.

But I’m waiting for LinkedIn members from the Sub-Continent to start posting replies asking her for job details so they can apply.

Linking wonder, Part 2

Further to my observation about responses to a LinkedIn job posting (all the replies were requests for the poster to email the full job description, even though they only thing you have to do to get it is click on the link), I came across another posting:

Well, fine.

But in the three months since the job was posted, here are the four responses:

I repeat my question from the previous post: why would anyone hire a product manager too stupid to even read the posting of a PRODUCT MANAGER OPENING, or click on the link to find out the details?

&, if these people are indeed getting hired, that might explain some of the software you see out there.

Linking wonder

I get emails from my various LinkedIn groups, which usually contain (among other things) job postings. I clicked on this one because it mentioned Paris, but because I am definitely not the Tommy Hilfiger type, I was ready to close my browser when I took a look at the comments.

  

At the time I took the screen shot, there were 45 responses (at least 75% being from India/Pakistan). But every one of them was asking for the poster to email details; which I though interesting, since all you have to do is click on the link &, you know, see the full listing.

The question that occurs to me is, Why would anyone hire someone too stupid to click a link? Much less relocate that person from India?

Recruiters 27

Okay—if anyone wants to know why American business is in such a state of disarray, let me share with you a job posting for a software product manager. This was on the company—a Forbes 50 corporation—website. Yes, this is an actual screen shot; this is what you find on the site (except I’ve blurred the name):

Now, for those of you who don’t know what a product manager does—s/he is the vortex of all communication about his/her product. You’re collecting stories from users, converting them to requirements, horse-trading with development on how much can get done in this release, iterating testing with QA, creating all value propositions, building marketing campaigns, training & supporting sales teams and then doing it all over again.

You’re speaking to a wide range of audiences; writing and rewriting large, complex documents; interacting with senior management, techies and people off the street. There’s nothing you do that doesn’t involve critical communication.

So I just despair when I see that for a position basically drenched in complex communications to a whole universe of audiences, this presumably sophisticated global corporation is happy to have someone with only basic knowledge of English. And what is that—can order lunch at Burger King?

Their wish list is intermediate fluency. Is that—can order dinner at Applebee’s?

Please also note their spelling of knowledge. They just are not thinking.

But they are definitely communicating.

Hedgehog's dilemma

This has been making the rounds of the social networks:

Now, I can't confirm that there's actually an A. Hedgeh, Ph.D., which is what I'd assume the "Dr." would be in this instance. (Medical doctors would never have their name on anything, including a cocktail napkin, without the M.D. designator.)

What interests me about this is not the cleverness about adding "og" to "Hedgeh". It's the abomination of using the objective case ("whomever") for the subject of the clause. I shudder to think of the standards of any academic institution that would grant a doctorate to someone who hasn't grasped that difference, much less hiring him/her.

Also, I'm not wild about the merging of "door" and "sign".

The law is a ass

Ah. Of course. That lawsuit that the “concerned mom” in San Diego filed against Nutella last year—because it turns out that a spread of ground-up hazelnuts and chocolate has calories—has been settled.

The mom who’s apparently incapable of reading labels has won. 

And if you’ve bought a jar of the product in the past few years, you can get in on the settlement, to the tune of $4.

Of course—if you’re also too literacy-challenged to read a nutrition label, I’m not sure how you’re going to manage a legal claim, but whatever.

Public house

A friend who rings at the local church in Cookham (UK) sent me this story from the Daily Mail, as she knows my penchant for the oddity.

Seems that the other afternoon the bartender at The Crown pub turfed out a couple of farm workers for being dressed in “work clothes”. What they were wearing was “casual trousers” and polo shirts with the logo of the farm where they work.

In other words—they were wearing what most tech company employees would consider high-end office wear.

They’d evidently just come from visiting a friend in hospital, so it’s not like they were covered with manure. From the DM’s photo, the one on the left could have tucked in his shirt, but otherwise I can’t see any indicator that there was any imminent danger of them breaking out in Liverpool football chants or demanding a darts tournament.

If you go to The Crown’s web site—which is poorly designed and gives a minimum of information, never a good sign when it comes to choosing an eating or lodging establishment, right on the home page it says they welcome all visitors, with no mention of a dress code:

But from the photos you can see behind the text block on every page, the pub looks more like an ad for Conran than a country pub. Check out that faux-distressed bar, for one.

Also, its menu puts the Ploughman’s Lunch (or “Ploughmans Lunch, as it’s printed)—which is bread, cheese and paté—in the Salads category (although they refer to the paté as “Chicken Liver Parfait). And tags it with a V for “contains no meat, suitable for vegetarians. Which also applies to the Caesar salad—which is at least a salad, but which has anchovies.

Actually, their menu is a hoot in and of itself for jumped-up-ness. Which probably describes the place accurately, ergo the landlord’s apparent belief that money from the pockets of parvenus is better than that from plebeians.

Keeping in mind that you don’t really go to the DM for the highest standards of reportage, there were still a couple of things about this story that are particularly amusing.

The paper mentions that the pub reopened recently after an alleged £600K refurbishment, and names a local low-level has-been celeb as a highlight of that reopening. I happen to know this person, and you need to trust me when I tell you that The Crown was not setting the fashion bar anywhere above a mud scraper when it had him in, so I don’t get them going all snooty on the sons of the soil.

 

The implication of the story was also that the patrons in business suits were acceptable, indeed desirable, and that if they started admitting blokes in “builders clothes” (whatever the hell they are), all the toffs would scram due to having to mix with the smelly and badly behaved plebs.

My personal experience from several years of riding London buses and the Tube is that an Englishman being in a business suit is not a guarantee of any standard of hygiene. Or, for that matter, of any better manners than your average lager lout.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.